Asset Registration System

African and Asian countries are emerging as great investment destinations for investors globally as it has half of the world’s fastest-growing economies as per a World Economic Forum report. Ironically these countries also raked up abysmal rankings in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) consistently, year after year. This can be attributed to severe systemic corruption breeding in the public sectors across these regions.

Thus arises the need for these governments to launch progressive anti-corruption reforms with the aim of instilling public faith in governance, increasing efficiency in government spending and boosting private investments through a mandate to register their wealth. One such initiative in this direction is an Asset Registration and Declaration System. It performs the basic function of registration of the assets, keeping documents of the registration, issuing certificates, renewal and providing information to the public about the registration. Earlier, the whole process of asset registration followed a manual entry in the booklet which was designed and maintained for asset registration. The process was cumbersome and entailed enormous manpower. There were difficulties in making changes, validating information, data security, detecting duplicity and portability. The whistleblower had to physically visit the office to register their objections putting confidentiality at stake.

This system offers the following features:

• Single-window: A single-window, role-based multilingual web application that integrates and accommodates the entire asset disclosure system
• Unique Registration: Unique identification code helps to identify each registrant across the application. The system is designed and configured in such a way that makes it easy for the users to authenticate and access the workflow based on the role defined making the system more efficient by avoiding duplicity
• Validation & Verification: Concerned officials can verify the data on-line, approve the information and issue certificates as the information is available for validation and verification immediately, saving time
• Dashboard & MIS Reports: Facilitate monitoring of the asset registration process with different types of reports. Storage and record is not a problem as everything is saved and archived for future reference
• Audit Trail: An audit trail provides documented evidence of the sequence of accessibility of DARS application and keeps track of the purpose behind the access. Every transaction is monitored through unique UID & IP Address and also keeps track of the values changed or updated which helps in comparing the original with the latest values
• Confidential Whistleblowing: Helps in dealing with scenarios wherein a whistleblower informs the federal team about fraudulent practices being adopted in the asset registration process maintaining high confidentiality.
• Offline Usage: The application can be run as an offline solution to deal with the network constraints in few regions/ in difficult terrains with the provision of periodic data synchronization with the web application

The implementation of this system has the potential to usher in great process efficiency and open up avenues for analytics-based intelligence to eradicate corruption in a country. A rich database of asset declaration has the potential for statistical analysis of the economic status and disparity and region-wise wealth analysis against GDP which can help in predicting conflicts of interests and corruption. This unique solution has been successfully implemented by Ethiopia in their efforts to strengthen governance through better accountability and transparency.